A life by the bay of foghorns, frogs and loved cats and dogs

By Christopher MorganSeptember 4 2002

One of the things I like most about living where I live is that I can hear the bell from Elwood Primary School. It's far enough away to be a gentle sound that comes drifting lazily across the rooftops.

I try to walk down to the Elwood canal at precisely 11am because I think that is when it's at its prettiest. Before the new bridges were built, it was almost like walking along the towpath of a regional Dutch town. And that's when people are more likely to say hello: the women with the tennis racquets who hit balls for their dogs; the parent of the child leaning over the railing of the bridge looking for the little silvery fish in the water. Sometimes the canal gives off a distinctly non-upwardly mobile smell but the ducks and I are used to it.

A few weeks ago, we were visiting our friend who lives closer to the beach. It was a day of beautiful thin winter sunshine but in a matter of minutes a fantastically dense bank of fog rolled in. Everything was disappearing in this grey mist. A football match at the oval right next to the beach had to be suspended because no one could find the ball.

Some days I am walking down the street and I hear a foghorn blow out in the bay. It's easy to forget that Melbourne is a port. It's a sleepy sound and it fits in well to our street.

The hill at Point Ormond is the best place to watch fireworks, yachts, aerial displays, sunsets and dogs. Sit on the hill and watch your kids roll about the grass below.");document.write("

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Velvet the dog only had three legs. And in her later years she wasn't as quick to lift up her head to say hello. Some days you had to walk around her as she lay in the sun on the footpath. We patted her on our way to work and patted her on our way home. When she died her owners wrote her obituary in chalk on the footpath where she used to lie.

Around the corner in the Broadway there was a grave marked by a wooden cross in the garden of a block of flats. The grave was sheltered by a hydrangea and maybe that's what kept the inscription legible for so long. It was in a child's writing. The name of the cat I don't remember but the epitaph read, "the best cat in the world". When my own cat called out once in a voice I had never heard her use and lay down in front of me and died, I thought of that inscription.

Choochi was buried with great sadness and many tears in the back yard. The miniature rose bush that we planted above her has not stopped blooming.

I walk over to Ormond Road to have dinner in the bistro of the Elwood RSL. This strip of shops lay mortally wounded when I first moved here but now even the vet looks like a trattoria. And the thing is, you can dress people up in fabulous fashions, make them drive exotic cars and have mighty haircuts, but in the end people are just people. They like to sit down over a meal and talk to each other as they have done for ever. I walk up the footpath here when the dusk is alive with voices, laughter, the busy business of cafes, the clink of glasses and the aroma of food.

I go to a gym where the owner lives in the ceiling. He's fashioned himself a little nest among the rafters. I never thought I would find lifting heavy things so enjoyable. But it is gentle. The conversation is good. You meet people when they are in a certain frame of mind which is conducive to speaking their softer thoughts.

Occasionally a man misses the point and comes in and grunts his way through the whole thing so as to make people notice him. I find that intrusive but funnily enough, those men don't seem to stick at it for very long.

Our next-door neighbour has a great love for obscure musicals of the '30s and '40s. He told me of seeing a drunken Marlon Brando being poured into a convertible in Tahiti in 1958 and the car driving off with Marlon's legs sticking up out the back. Our neighbour grows lantana in his front yard, a direct descendant of the one his father struck 60 years ago.

One night I was walking home under the plane trees of Tennyson Street. It was a hot night. Suddenly at the intersection ahead, a car reversed crazily up the street and then sped past me. I only had time to look at the driver's frightened face before a shirtless, heavily bearded man came running around the corner after the car, screaming abuse.

He stopped in front of me. Neither of us could avoid the confrontation. He started spitting invective at me. He had very strong views about the sexual leanings of people who lived in my suburb. It was all very biblical. I expected him to pull out a sword and rush at me. I could see he was building himself up to attack me and so I stepped forward and told him in no uncertain terms that I had just been washing dishes all night in a very busy restaurant after being at work all day and that I was tired and in no mood at all for his ballyhoo.

He said OK, put his arm around my shoulders for a moment and then ran off down the centre of Tennyson Street yelling abuse into the night. I drive at night now. I don't feel safe anymore.

We walk along the canal to the beach every Sunday and then along the foreshore to Brighton. Some days the water looks like glass. Some days it looks like an ocean. We eavesdrop on the single lines of conversation we hear coming from the groups of people walking past in the other direction.

I was lying in bed early one morning when I heard a dreadful hissing coming from outside in intervals of five or six seconds. Fearful that my gas hot water service might be about to explode, I jumped up and stumbled out the back but there was nothing to be seen.

The hissing was coming from above, so I ran out on to the street in time to see a giant Freddo Frog dropping slowly behind the houses opposite. The pilot of the balloon was frantically trying to invest it with some hot air through his gas burner. It was very peaceful to watch Freddo sink out of sight. There was no one else who saw it.

It feels good to step out on to my street. The woman across the road is playing cello in her front room. Next door a desperate sounding singer is pleading over crackles and scratches, "Be my baby. Don't say no. Be my baby. On you I'll grow." A builder working on my other neighbour's house is singing the wrong words to My Sharona. A foghorn is drifting across the rooftops on a southerly wind. Vince, the dog down the street, is barking at a pigeon.